The dangers of hysteria over child abuse

The idea that children were encouraged to imagine nightmarish sexual assaults is deeply disturbing

Even if you don't want to go on watching them, it is hard to wipe some images from your mind. That was the case when the story broke about children who were said to have been abused at a Newcastle nursery.

Nearly four years ago, when the report on this abuse was published by Newcastle city council, pictures that seemed to be part of some blurred nightmare leapt from the newspapers into your brain. Strangers behind black doors, waiting for children to be delivered to them by nursery workers. Men dressed in clown costumes, slashing at children with knives. You could push these images away, and then you'd turn on the television or see another report and there they would be again.

The fact that the nursery workers, Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, had been acquitted in a criminal trial four years before this report was published, only served to underline an increasing feeling that child abuse was not being taken sufficiently seriously by the criminal justice system.

Demonstrations by the children's parents outside the court with banners stating "We believe the kids" caught a growing popular mood. Such heightened emotion was taken up by the tabloid media, which whipped up the sense of fear and injustice. The Sun even printed pictures of Ms Reed and Mr Lillie, with the caption: "Help us find these fiends. Do you know where perverts Lillie and Reed are now? Phone us. Don't worry about the cost – we will call you straight back." Way before the News of the World started its infamous name and shame campaign, two nursery workers went on the run for fear of being lynched.

Even people who were sceptical of such hysteria couldn't help but be touched by the story. Because the tale of children who had been abused in their nursery went right to the heart of many working parents' deepest sense of vulnerability. Nurseries, with their trained, vetted workers who can keep an eye on each other, have often seemed the safest option for childcare.

But no one will ever know how many women gave up work out of pure fear, after hearing that in a council-run nursery children could be assaulted and taken out into other people's homes to be abused during nursery hours.

And now, after all this horror and hysteria, the report on which the whole story was based has been found to be a series of lies. Or, as the judge in the libel case brought by the nursery workers put it earlier this week, it "included a number of fundamental claims which they [the authors] must have known to be untrue."

This case, as has already been noted, bears strange similarities with the Cleveland child abuse scandal, when dozens of children were removed from their parents on unreliable medical evidence. Then, too, children who were eventually found not to have been abused were put through disturbing examinations, and adults were accused of abuse on wispy allegations.

That was 15 years ago, but the mood of hysteria that can erupt over child abuse is still as damaging. If you read the reports of the two investigative journalists, Bob Woffinden and Richard Webster, who followed the case and encouraged Ms Reed and Mr Lillie to start their libel proceedings, you can't help but be struck by their descriptions of the way that the children's interviews were carried out.

One expert supporting the nursery workers' libel claim, psychologist Maggie Bruck of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said that "extremely young and bewildered children were brought in and interrogated by interviewers who used the full array of suggestive techniques to elicit allegations of abuse".

The idea that young children were encouraged to imagine that they had suffered nightmarish sexual assaults is deeply disturbing. The unreliable medical evidence and the use of hearsay allegations in the report also suggest that its publication relied on a whole series of supposedly authoritative people – doctors, social workers, academics – who put their critical faculties aside once child abuse was mentioned. And this was directly contrary to the child's interests. If there was any abuse in the children's lives, it was lost in a blizzard of manufactured evidence and false allegations.

Since child abuse was entirely covered up for generations, it is hardly surprising that the first generation to start to speak about such abuse should sometimes find itself moved to extreme passion. The media has been quick to exploit this passion for justice, and has moved it towards less useful ends. Rather than playing on the growing sense of vulnerability and fear that we seem to be feeling as more child abuse is uncovered, it is now time for the media to try, as gently as possible, to damp down the hysteria that is leading to false allegations.

Those who sold their products on the back of the emotiveness of the Newcastle story should take a lead in forming a more measured tone. The Sun should make space for full reports on the success of the nursery workers' libel claim. Instead, yesterday they found room only for a short item on page 22, in which the only word that stood out in bold capitals was the "had" in the phrase: "a report ordered by Newcastle City Council said they HAD abused kids."

But now is not the time any more for heightened emotion or placard-waving – on either side of the debate. Because there is also a danger that in response to all this hysteria a backlash is evolving. That would be a terrible injustice for the real victims of child abuse. It has taken years of pressure by survivors of abuse and their supporters to bring into the light a crime that was once entirely invisible. And even now, it is still the case that victims of child abuse are routinely disbelieved. The recent uncovering of the extent of abuse by priests in the Catholic Church in the United States underlined how difficult it is for survivors of abuse to get justice. And convictions in child abuse cases are still notoriously difficult to secure.

Legislation designed to give children more of a voice in sex abuse cases, by allowing them to give all their evidence on video, has only just come into force in Britain, and campaigners are still keen to see other reforms to help children give evidence – such as the use of experts on child psychology to help juries weigh up their evidence. There is a great danger that the scepticism generated by the Newcastle case will damage such campaigns to give more weight to the voice of the child.

Yet we do not need false nightmares to understand the real horror of child abuse. Let's get away from the hysteria and concentrate on the only thing that matters – the experience of the child. After all, as Lord Justice Butler-Sloss memorably stated in her report on the Cleveland case: "The child is a person, not an object of concern."

n.walter@btinternet.com